Last week’s employment report really put the question away for me.

Yes, we are. It just hasn’t been officially announced yet.

Why am I so certain? We just had our eighth straight month of job losses. That alone means we are (or have been) in a recession. Eight months in a row is unusual and serious business.  First off, in 40 years we’ve never had more than two straight months of job losses, unless we were in a recession. Also, three of the six recessions we’ve had in the last 40 years never got bad enough to produce eight straight months of job losses. And finally, in the other three, we reached eight straight months only after the recession was over.

Here’s the tally:

2001 recession: The eighth straight month came in May, 2002 — six months after the recession was over.

1990 recession: The eighth straight month came in March, 1991 — by then, the recession was over.

1982 recession: The eighth straight month came in February, 1983 — again, months after the recession was over.

1980 recession: We never reached eight straight months of job losses, even though this was a nasty recession.

1973 recession: Again, we never reached eight straight months, and this was our second worst recession in the last 60 years.

1970 recession: We never reached eight.

On the bright side, every time we’ve had eight straight months of job losses, the recession was already over. So maybe — just maybe — we’re getting past this.

Tags: Economy, February data, Job losses, Recession